ATI Catalyst 6.9 released

[Steve]

September's Cats are here. You can grab them over on ATI's website. Performance improvements are, according to the release notes:

* 3DMark2006 overall performance improves 6.7-23.7% with anti-aliasing enabled due to improvements in HyperZ efficiency on the Radeon X1300, X1600 and X1800 series of products. The largest gains can be seen on Crossfire configurations and/or 256MB card configurations at resolutions of 1280x1024 or greater.
* Doom3 performances improves up to 9.3% due to further OpenGL shader complier and transform engine optimizations on the entire Radeon X1000 Series of products. The largest gains can be seen on Radeon X1900 configurations at resolutions of 1600x1200 or higher .

So, if you like playing 3D mark you can get a perfor... oh wait! Well at least Doom 3 performance is improved. Wonder if that filters through to other games based on its engine?

[UKMuFFiN]

I checked the site like 30-60mins ago and thought, hmmm I wonder when September drivers are comming out.

[BlackDwarf]

And, as usual, you can update your ATI-powered Mac's drivers here

[UKMuFFiN]

And Linux

[Steve]

To quote the guys over at Beyond3D:

...by far the most important feature introduced by this driver release is Crossfire support for the Intel P965 Chipset. That said, the feature is being enabled for Radeon X1900-series boards and Direct3D applications only. We should note that one of the graphics boards will be hooked to a PCIe 4x port, due to P965 support for just one PCIe 16x slot only and therefore as a result performance may differ from other Crossfire implementations.

[ffall1c]

Will be giving these a try tonight and give feedback for those hesitant to update.

I know ATI drivers originally were not too good, and then they improved greatly, but have been reading a lot of negative feedback about the drivers again of late.

Me, I'm not afraid to ruin my installation and re-install windows if something bad were to happen.

I have a question though - I would prefer to use just the ATI driver, adn not CCC, and then just use ATI tray tools for any detailed management of settings. however, ATI tray tools does not currently support setting the clock speed on the ATI card for when running 3D apps, which I can set in CCC. So how can I be sure the clock is oging up to the 625/1450 required for when running 3D apps, and does not just stick at the default 2D clock of 500/1100?

Hope the question makes sense the way I have phrased it...

[UKMuFFiN]

I don't like the CCC either, much prefer the old control panel

[jonathan_phang]

I dont like it either, but i have to say that recent releases have been improving, and i even think that they have been working on the memory usage of it... I would prefer a cleaner/slimmer version of it instead of the .Net version, but after i realised that i dont really need to go into CCC that often, i was fine with it...

Havent tried out the 6.9 version yet because I'm using the Chuck Patch and i dont think theyve done a new version of that yet, but it might be worth doing it for the improvements on OGL games.

[ffall1c]

Well, did a clean install of windows last night and pc running nicely again. Went stragith to these drivers and I think they are doing pretty good. I know they do not perform as well as the Omega drivers for Quake 4, but overall, they are running nicely.

I managed to click on the maximum quality button, which enabled 4 or 6 x AA (can't remember which). I did not realise this and went in to Oblivion with HDR enabled and teh game ran fine... Well, I say fine, but I was getting 20 FPS. Took me a little while to figure out why my FPS was so low.

Whether OB actually did run with HDR or not I don't know, but the option was enabled and AA was turned on in CCC.

Honestly, I don't mind the CCC too much. Yeah, it is bloated and a bit slow to load, but these days, how many people dont really have the memory to spare that this might hog?

Besides, as stated before, you don't need to go into it very often....

[freakeystyley34]

I'll have to download these soon, i'm still on 6.4 iirc!

[jonathan_phang]

@ffall1c - though you have the option for HDR on in-game and then AA in the control panel, this doesnt mean its on. You'll have to resinstall the display driver component to be the 'Chuck' Patch - which allows this to happen (and also on Call of Juarez incidentally).

If you have enabled HDR in the game - it will be on for sure - but you might not have AA on - but that too should be obvious if you crank that and AF up high.

[jharne]

I can't say I mind CCC, then again I've probally only used it twice in the last two years.